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Its like this ... when you try and crack a wpa key using a dictionary. The program your using needs to calculate the ssid of the AP. That takes along time so to speed things up we match the ssid with each word from our dictionary ahead of time.

Basically you can go from 200 words a second up to 200,000 words a second. However that doesn't include the time it takes to make the rainbow tables.

Using backtrack for the first time is like being 10 years old again with the keys to a Ferrari.

Well just an fyi it doesn't matter when using aircrack or cowpatty as to my knowledge those are only single threaded apps and dont take advantage of all your cores. Also cowpatty is faster but make sure your wordlist is under a gig as it has probs using larger files. Aircrack uses sql so the file size can be much bigger.

Regardless of that you'll definitely want to check out the pyrit/cuda tut for generating the tables using your vid card as it SIGNIFICANTLY speeds up the process.

Using backtrack for the first time is like being 10 years old again with the keys to a Ferrari.

A rainbow table is a lookup table offering a time-memory tradeoff used in recovering the plaintext password from a password hash generated by a hash function, often a cryptographic hash function. A common application is to make attacks against hashed passwords feasible. A salt is often employed with hashed passwords to make this attack more difficult, often infeasible.

A hash function is any well-defined procedure or mathematical function which converts a large, possibly variable-sized amount of data into a small datum, usually a single integer that may serve as an index into an array. The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, hash sums, or simply hashes.

In cryptography, a salt comprises random bits that are used as one of the inputs to a key derivation function. The other input is usually a password or passphrase.

Thats about as simple as your going to get it, first paragraph of each wiki page

The better question is why are you getting us to do your homework for you?

Using backtrack for the first time is like being 10 years old again with the keys to a Ferrari.

It's no homework it's information research....
btw the english wiki page about rainbowtables are much easyer to understand that the german one...
and the external link is also great...
sorry but there are not much german UNDERSTANDABLE explanations about rainbowtables...
it's not that im too lazy to search... I just don't understand this high technicaly writen textes (yet)...